Paid Advertising vs Organic Posts

To pay or not to pay … Weigh out the pros and cons of organic posts and paid advertising.    

Paid and organic social serve different objectives.  To determine what’s right for you, it pays to know the uses and benefits of each, be clear on your budget, and set measurable goals.

Organic Posts

Organic posts refer to the free content that appears in the feeds of the people who follow you.  Your reach is expanded when your followers’ followers choose to share your post and also when your hashtags match a user’s search.  It’s free promotion.        

Your number one goal of organic posts should be brand awareness – your reputation, what you’re known for and why you do what you do.  That is the key to nurturing a connection with your followers, fostering trust and winning their loyalty.  We encourage our clients to leverage organic posts to showcase expertise, share behind-the-scenes glimpses, highlight customer testimonials, and encourage interaction among their community of followers.

The catch?  Organic reach is often limited by algorithms and competition.

Only a small percentage of your followers will ever actually see your organic posts.  Social media is saturated with content so ranking algorithms are used to determine what you see, based on your profile and preferences.  It is personalized by the type of content you most often interact with, where the content came from (like friends or somebody you follow), and what’s trending.   

Paid Advertising

Paid advertising gets your posts into the feeds of your specific target audience.  You can tailor your paid campaigns to target specific demographics which isn’t something you can do with organic social. You can either ‘boost’ an organic post or you can create a unique campaign. 

Your goal for paid advertising should be based on your specific marketing objectives.  Do you want to get more people to visit your website and take a specific action?  Do you want to add a certain number of followers over a specific amount of time?  Do you want to promote an event?  Promote a new product or service?  

Some social media platforms, including Facebook and LinkedIn, allow retargeting.  Retargeting uses browser-based cookies to show advertisements to audiences that have previously interacted with your brand online.  If they have visited your website, these retargeting ads act as prompts and reminders to return to your website and complete a form or finalize a purchase.

The catch?  More resources are required to get a positive return on your investment. 

Paid ads should be carefully designed, tested, monitored and measured.  You need a strong understanding of social media and its inner workings to set reasonable budgets and realistic goals to achieve desired results.  Although it would be ideal, you just won’t gain a million new followers with a single $100 campaign.   

You need expertise to design and test your ads.  Split testing is a crucial step that is too often ignored or disregarded.  You should always test versions of your CTA, copywriting and visuals by a smaller audience before allocating your entire social media budget to an ad campaign. Tweaks to an ad’s placement, format, verbiage or even the target audience can have a huge impact on fulfilling your goals for the campaign. 

Budgeting

The average marketing budget depends on industry type, business size, and your specific marketing objectives.  According to Salesforce, B2C companies should spend 15% of their revenue on campaigns. Hubspot reports the average spend for a business was 8.7% of total revenue last year.  We recommend budgeting between 7% - 10% of your gross revenue and monitoring that budget to ensure it produces a positive return on investment and is meeting your marketing objectives. 

The Solution

The hybrid model is the best of both worlds.  It’s a strategy that maximizes your reach while keeping your budget in line. 

By looking at your social analytics, you can identify content that would convert well for an ad.  You can quickly transform an organic post into a promotional paid ad in a matter of clicks by using the boost feature.  Monitor your content performance closely because clicks and followers earned are key indicators for spotting top content.

It's a complex process but we’re here to help.  Let’s audit your marketing strategy so you can tell YOUR story!